In operation of a search engine, the search engine provides a client terminal of a client with several search keywords that are used in placing advertisements. The client terminal usually has a certain amount of resources or data, referred to as “occupied resources,” such as data transfer bandwidth, data transmission priority, and data transmission quality of service (QOS), and etc., or other data and capital resources that are valuable to the search engine. After the client has transmitted the certain resources or data to the search engine through the client terminal, the client may obtain several chosen search keywords. With respect to each search keyword, based on the differences in amount of the occupied resources provided by the client, a client's advertisement matching the search keyword can be placed on a corresponding location of a web page. When the client selects several search keywords, the amount of all of the occupied resources provided by the client is recorded in a data file stored in a database. The data file may be referred to as an entire account. The amount of the client's occupied resources can be reflected through the entire account, and based on the historical data of the client's occupied resources, the estimated cost and earning of the client's entire account can be forecasted. Here, the cost refers to the occupied resources provided by the client to choose the search keywords, and the earning refers to a number of clicks, a number of feedbacks, a number of closed transactions and other things that the client gains through the placed advertisements based on the chosen search keywords.
When forecasting the estimated costs and earnings, the current techniques add the estimated cost and earning of each keyword chosen by the client to obtain the estimated cost and earning of the client's entire account. For example, one client chooses search keywords a and b, then provides the occupied resources to each search keyword as p1 and p2. If the estimated earning and estimated cost of the search keyword a at the owned-resource p1 is v1 and c1 respectively, and the estimated earning and estimated cost of the search keyword b at the owned-resource p2 is v2 and c2 respectively, then the estimated earning of the client's entire account is v1+v2, and the estimated cost of the client's entire account is c1+c2.
The current forecasting methods for the estimated value relies only on accumulation of each search keyword's estimated value to obtain the estimated value of the entire account, thus there is often a big difference between the estimated value and the client's expected value. The most common difference is that the estimated cost is higher than the upper limit of the client's expected cost. When the search engine server returns to the client the estimated cost whose value is higher than the upper limit, the client removes one or more search keywords based on the estimated value, and then returns the selection result to the search engine server. This creates additional steps for the client, thereby decreasing the client experience. In addition, based on the client's returned result, the search engine server needs to re-estimate the estimated values of the search keywords in the client's entire account and return the result to the client. This consumes excess network resources due to the many communications between the search engine server and the client. Since the search engine server needs to perform multiple estimated value forecasts in order to meet the client's requirements, it also increases the workload of the search engine server.